Archive for December, 2008

The Vietnam War Timeline

December 30th, 2008

My newly launched project, a timeline of the Vietnam War, is now online.

The project provides an interactive timeline of the conflict that allows users to scroll through years and see key events and related media in a chronological order. This is still the beta of the project insofar as the information is still being added, but contributions are expected and welcomed from veterans, historians and other with an interest in this war.

Information for the techies: the project uses jQuery to power the timeline and the backend data is stored using MySQL and delivered with PHP. The timeline degrades gracefully to allow for viewing in non-javascript devices. Future updates are to include an RSS feed of the latest added information.

The project is run and hosted voluntarily by myself.

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Posted in History, The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War – A Reading List.

December 15th, 2008

As a child Robert Mason dreamed of levitation – years later he was flying with the 1st Air Cavalry in the Vietnam War. At 14 I stumbled across his account of his training and services at the stick of a Huey 1H in my step-father’s book collection. “Chickenhawk”   in me a fascination of two things at an impressionable age: helicopters and the Vietnam War.

I have chosen these books because they tie up the persepectives on some key aspects of the Vietnam war, namely:

  • What lead from the French being defeated to the American Invasion.
  • The experimental use of Helicopters and the Airborne Cavalry.
  • The ground fight from the persepctive of the foot soldiers (Grunts).
  • The differences in tactic between the PAVN/VC and the US Military.
  • Dispelling of certain myths surrounding the war and its veterans.

» Read more: The Vietnam War – A Reading List.

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Posted in History, Reading, The Vietnam War

Drag and drop reordering of database fields (sortables) with jQuery

December 7th, 2008

This tutorial explains how to display a list of items from a database that can be reordered in real time by dragging and dropping, using the jQuery library. Moreover, no page reload is required on every reorder. If you want a bigger introduction to why you may want to do this I suggest reading my tutorial on how to achieve the same functionality using scriptaculous.

Previously I have explained how to achieve this in Scriptaculous and Mootools.

» Read more: Drag and drop reordering of database fields (sortables) with jQuery

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Posted in Ajax, Javascript, PHP, User Interface, Web Development, jQuery